If you’ll recall some elementary chemistry for a moment, the activation energy of a reaction is the energy threshold that needs to be crossed for the reaction to occur. A catalyst is an agent that doesn’t actually take part in a reaction, but whose presence lowers the activation energy, allowing the reaction to take place. Many chemical reactions aren’t feasible without catalysts.
It bugs me a little to see Steve Jobs described as a superlative inventor. I don’t think of Steve Jobs as an inventor, I think of him as a very potent catalyst of invention. Now, you can certainly divide the group of people we call “inventors” into a continuum, where you have what I’ll call “pure inventors” on the one end, and what I’ll call catalysts on the other. At the pure end, you have guys like Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla, guys who largely lacked interest in or talent at commercialization or organization of invention. At the other end of the spectrum, you have guys like Jobs. Many have compared Jobs to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, but I think those guys were further towards the pure end of the spectrum. It’s true that Ford and Edison built up organizations around them, corporations where thousands of inventors were making things, but they started out as guys essentially tinkering in their garages. Steve Jobs wasn’t the guy building automobiles or phonographs in his garage, that was Woz. (Well, he built computers, but you get the point.)
I don’t mean to imply that, because I call one end of the spectrum pure, that the other end is impure. There is a continuum between architecture and engineering, too, but engineering is not impure architecture, and architecture is not impure engineering. Both sides like to occasionally declare their superiority and bitch about the other, but it’s not like either could exist independently. My father, who is an engineer, complains about the disconnect between the things he’s tasked with building and the reality in which he needs to build them; the other side probably complains about the brutishness of the engineer, the utilitarian ethos, the aesthetic illiteracy. But each side needs the other. It’s not a war, it’s more like friendly banter punctuated by alternating bursts of irritation and appreciation.
Catalysis is really important. Without it, nothing much happens. I think it’s important to separate the catalysts from the reagents, though. I don’t mean to rag on Steve Jobs, although some of the worst hero worship that’s been displayed in the last few days leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Jobs is not one of my personal heroes, but I recognize the undeniably significant track record of the companies he led and I recognize his inspirational qualities. In fact, I think Jobs is the purest catalyst of invention we’ve seen in recent years— certainly I’m having trouble thinking of anyone else—and consequently, the most potent. But that also makes him that much more unlike the Teslas and Leonardos of the world.
We’ve grown used to seeing technology as a steady, inevitable march, but it’s interesting to think about about the conditions that need to be met for it to continue. If an invention is to change the course of history, someone needs to come up with an idea, then that idea needs to be made practical in such a way that it can touch a large number of people. This is not one reaction, but a series of discrete reactions, each of which is dependent on a number of external catalysts. Although people can be catalysts of invention, other factors can be just as potent.
Some inventions appear almost sui generis, but others are forced by the necessity of circumstances. Consider one of the two most important inventions of all time, agriculture (the other being industrial production):
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.
Was agriculture inevitable? The catalyst for agriculture was increased population density, or perhaps it was the other way around, but either way, the two reinforced each other once the thing got going. But there does exist an alternative path: the hunter-gatherer way of life. In fact, there still exist hunter-gatherer tribes. The few that do exist are marginalized and tiny, though. It was theoretically possible for humanity to just decide to stall population growth and continue living as hunter-gatherers, but as soon as any part of agriculture was invented, whatever tribe invented it would very quickly grow in population, necessitating further innovations, and thus the whole arc of modern history would be kickstarted. Farming, cities, modern systems of government: all this stuff is interdependent. It seems too unlikely that ten thousand years would pass and no one would stumble upon any of the parts that could catalyze all the others.
The same thing applies to the industrial revolution. If it didn’t happen in England in the mid-18th century, it would have happened somewhere else, close in time and space. As soon as one of the factors that catalyzed the industrial revolution are in place—and it seems too incredible that hundreds of years could pass without someone inventing one of the pieces of the puzzle—all the others follow. But surely it isn’t the case that every major invention is inevitable and predetermined.
Consider fossil fuel. In a hundred years, two hundred years at most, we will have exhausted absolutely all the fossil fuel in the world, even taking into account hypothetical mega-finds in the future. For us to continue expending as much energy as we do—and since agriculture, we have always been increasing our energy usage—we must rely on other technologies. Necessity will likely breed inventions in renewable energy that are capable of sustaining further growth in energy usage. But what if we simply sidestepped the whole fossil fuel stage and jumped directly to the future? Is it possible that there was an alternative path? It seems likely that future inventions will depend on past inventions that could not have happened if we didn’t pass through the fossil fuel stage, but we don’t know that yet.
Science fiction loves to speculate about alternate technological paths. One common trope: what if the computer, another invention that seems inevitable in retrospect, had been invented a hundred years earlier? The seed—the idea of a programmable machine—had been planted with the invention of the Jacquard loom; Charles Babbage had the blueprint for a computing machine a hundred years before the first real computers were built. But the necessary catalysts weren’t there. Babbage never did build a complete prototype of his analytic engine, and even if he did somehow pull it together, there were still many obstacles between the prototype and the computer in every home and every pocket. Obstacles that Steve Jobs types are very good at removing.
We have been conditioned to think that modern inventions are so much cleverer than inventions of the past. It’s interesting to note how technology moves in paradigms, and the ingenuity with which people of the past have exhausted any given technology before a new one comes along. Although I have only anecdotal evidence, I think it’s often the case that modernity simply cannot improve on past inventions without cheating. Consider this project, which aims to build an authentic replica of a viking longship. Two previous attempts were unseaworthy, despite evidence that the original did sail without sinking. And the budget for this replica is two million dollars. In 2011, we still can’t build a more reliable or cheaper viking ship; we need to use completely different tools and completely different techniques—in short, a new technology—to make better boats.
The longship was a radical invention when it appeared in the 8th century. Although not the most advanced ship in the world, it was significantly better than anything that had appeared in Northern Europe before. Without it, the Norse peoples that ravaged, colonized and ruled large parts of Europe from around 800-1100 would have been totally insignificant. And in maybe one or two hundred years, that technology was exhausted. A thousand years later, we are still unable to significantly improve the technology—we’re even having a hard time replicating it. But we are many, many paradigm shifts removed from the vikings, and our ships, which are much better than viking ships, look very different.
Although the iPhone is very different from Babbage’s analytic engine, both are classical computers. The fundamentals of computers have not changed in two hundred years. I wonder how long it will be before we exhaust the classical computer and must turn to quantum computers for further improvement. And I wonder what it will be that catalyzes that change, which seems as inevitable as the invention of industry and agriculture and classical computers.
Oct 10, 2011